A little more than a year ago, IBM Corp. was in the throes of a publicity nightmare, scrambling to fix bugs that emerged with the launch of a Web portal used for all things contracting. Now, I imagine Big Blue is just relieved to not be CGI Federal.

Certainly, the challenges faced by CGI Federal, the Fairfax-based contractor generally blamed for the botched launch of HealthCare.gov, far exceed those of IBM. That’s because of scale. IBM’s System for Award Management, or SAM, went online in July and was taken offline days later. It mattered a whole lot to contractors and federal buyers. It didn’t matter all that much to everybody else.

HealthCare.gov makes real the Affordable Care Act. That alone is going to mean a whole lot of scrutiny. And then there’s the volume. More than 8.1 million people reportedly visited the site from Oct. 1-4.

The circumstances faced by both companies are actually quite similar.

Both were charged with unifying a whole bunch of disjointed data, with IBM consolidating a slew of federal acquisition systems, and CGI Federal enabling enrollment into various health insurance plans for residents of the 36 states that opted to not create their own health care exchange. Also, both faced a much-hyped launch date. And neither had a gradual rollout.

So now what? IBM was ordered to revamp SAM and the portal eventually went back online. CGI Federal, which didn’t respond to my request for comment, is apparently getting some help. President Barack Obama, speaking about the botched launch Oct. 21, said that “some of the best IT talent in the entire country” joined the team to fix the problem.

“Experts from some of America’s top private-sector tech companies who, by the way, have seen things like this happen before, they want it to work,” he added.

Indeed. None more than CGI Federal. It’s just too bad government and industry alike didn’t learn more from those past mistakes.